Kubrick Cubed

I recently discovered an excellent site dedicated to the life & work of the extraordinary Stanley Kubrick. This is essentially a compilation of press articles, reviews, and highly erudite essays. At the time of writing there were a number of essays dealing with the 2001 conundrum, possibly Kubrick's most abstruse and baffling film. Many essayists seem to be attempting to unravel the virtually impenetrable logic of the films more abstract sequences, non however, come to satisfactory conclusions or proffer fully coherent analysis but I hasten to add that this is not the fault of any writers lack of analytical ability. However, all Kubrick fans are more than familiar with the overarching concrete themes addressed in 2001 but none are capable of deciphering any universal truth or meaning conveyed in the Star-Gate to Hotel Room to Star Child sequence. Kubrick never proffered any answers himself and continued to draw a veil of mystery over the whole film. I have always tended to read the more confounding aspects of the film as cleaver devices primarily intended to convey a verisimilitude of incomprehensibility, the reality of infinity, an encounter with a vastly superior intelligence, possibly the divine creative force itself, and the process of crossing dimensional boundaries. These sequences are deliberately non-reductive, impossible to analyse, but instead seem to be poetic metonymy for the possibilities of relativity, the soul in transit, and subjugation to the psychological manipulations of a higher power. Kubrick never wanted the film to be "analysed" and he famously fell shy of entering into semiological debates about any of his work. He wanted audiences to engage with his films on the same level as poetry, a knowing subjective level, and a level of intelligent and culturally informed feeling. Maybe this is quite a paradoxical assertion in view of Kubrick's unrivalled pedantry and perfectionism. However, the creation of a perfect mise-en-scene in some ways frees the observer's mind to concentrate on the essence of possible realities rather than the artifice of film making itself, and this post neo-realist mimetic is essential to the whole body of Kubrick's work.

In 2001, Kubrick takes us on an epic journey into the realm of questions no one can answer, but with which everyone is familiar on a poetic level. The journey is embellished with the narrative decorations of machine intelligence versus human, Darwinian, and Nietzscheian, subtexts ultimately arriving at its incomprehensible destination and showing us just how it feels to encounter the infinitely unknowable we are no wiser than the astronoughts, the powers that dispatched them, or HAL. It is an enlightening, chilling, profound, upsetting, and completely unforgettable experience. The psychological response to such an event is necessarily confusing and sends us into a state of endless but futile soul searching, a search for answers, and this provocation is I think the genius of 2001. It is one of the few films I know that still remain open to interpretation and the lack of closure and resolution is so cleverly crafted. Have a look at the Kubrick Site